Chinatown

Today, my roommate and I woke up at 6:30 AM to get to breakfast on time because right after breakfast our whole group met up to have a reflection about our first impressions of Singapore. After that we got a lecture by the very charismatic Dr. Wong. I felt like it was a stand up comedy routine that was about the facts of Singapore. He told us almost everything we ever need to know about Singapore during that lecture and I honestly enjoyed it. After the lecture we had lunch and then went to a Peranakan museum, which was three stories tall. The Peranakan are people who are hybrids between the native of Malay and any other race. The most common one is the Chinese Peranakan. I thought this museum was really interesting and provided me with a lot of fun facts. My favorite part of the museum was a room where they had close up pictures of various different kinds of Peranakan with which race of Peranakan they were, their name and a quote. I just thought it was very well done and it had me feel connected to the Peranakan.



After the museum, we headed to Chinatown and had dinner there with one of Dr. Perumal's friends. This was by far my favorite meal of the trip. I am a very picky eater, so up until this point I have just been tolerating the food and not really enjoying it. Although, this meal might have changed my mind. Once we finished eating we hit the town, Chinatown to be exact. The first thing I did was I went on the hunt for souvenirs for some very lucky people back in the states. At this point, it was just me and a small group of friends out on the town. We agreed to go to a different Buddhist temple, because I really enjoyed the Buddhist temple we went to yesterday. Unfortunately, the Buddhist temple was closed when we tried to see it, so we just had to take pictures in front of it.



During our excursion we stumbled upon another temple, but this one was a Hindu temple. This temple was so much bigger and more colorful than yesterday's temple. We had to take off our shoes, of course, but luckily this time they didn't make me wear a skirt. When we first got in we looked at all the paintings on the ceiling. It was cool because we knew what was going on in the picture. For example, there was a painting of the three Hindu gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. We could easily differentiate the three and that was the first time I actually applied something that I learned in class. While we were there we could see people praying and making food sacrifices, so I thought was was really interesting. I just wish we had a tour guide to explain what was happening, because we were confused about what was happening a good portion of the time. Apparently, this temple must be a big tourist attraction, because if you wanted to take pictures you had to pay $3. That price was three dollars too high for me, so I decided to just sneak some pictures when nobody was watching.

 

We capped off the night with some really good shaved ice and arrived back to the hotel at around 9:00 PM. So it was another full and exhausting day, but thankfully it wasn't as tiring as yesterday.



Sal Puma